(urth) No Planets Strike question for those with religious backgrounds ...

[Norwood, Frederick Hudson]

T. H. White is one of my favorite authors – up there with Wolfe, Tolkien, and Peake.  I hope the reference in the first X-Men movie brought him new readers.  I recently read Farewell Victoria for the first time.  Does anyone know what Wolfe thinks about White?

Rick

From: Urth [mailto:urth-bounces at lists.urth.net] On Behalf Of Marc Aramini
Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2015 10:21 AM
To: The Urth Mailing List
Subject: Re: (urth) No Planets Strike question for those with religious backgrounds ...

"In The Godstone and the Blackymore," White even comments on being observed by a Chough:

"I thought how strange that young ravens should be as small as jackdaws, that they should have this thin and almost curlew beak. I looked earnestly upon the beak, and upon the feet. My heart bounded as I distinguished the redness, even against the sky. No wonder they were so trim, so much lovelier than any of the black-guard I had previously known. They were not ravens at all. They were the red-beaked choughs of legend, looking on Man for the first time—as I on them."

On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 5:17 AM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com<mailto:marcaramini at gmail.com>> wrote:
I suppose it could mean "web of swords/important events" as well...
The story also uses the donkey and the bull to re-enact the rather famous allegory of the long spoons - hell would be much more like heaven if the people fed each other rather than simply tried to feed themselves.
I feel that Wolfe's religious stories, for whatever reason, are highly dependent upon older texts.

"How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen" is intensely dependent upon T.H. White's biographical travels to the Inniskeas, where White became obsessed with a possibly pagan stone used as the pillow of a holy man which was appropriated in Catholic reverence, depicted in his nonfictional "The Godstone and the Blackymore". There is a scene at the start of that in which the historically ambiguously sexually oriented White talks to his older patron Bunny passionately about falconry that reminded me so strongly of Blood and Musk in The Book of the Long Sun that it was almost shocking.

On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 4:58 AM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com<mailto:marcaramini at gmail.com>> wrote:
I am writing up a whole bunch of the short story ones now, and there is a scene at the end of the rather allegorical (but obviously so) No Planets Strike, which depicts the reign of the pagan world (The Beautiful Ones of the planet Sidhe/The Fair Ones) as alien control of humanity, and pretty much involves scenes directly from the bible and the life of Christ from our narrator Donkey ... and there is a scene at the end where he talks about folks going to the planet Barrmaser, though some pronounce it Biladmaser.
These words are Somalian words, and "maser" is tissue.  If it stopped there I would expect it to be mere coincidence, but in Somali Barr means "important events" and Bilad means "sword" ... so we have three Somalian words.
Does "tissue of Swords" or "Tissue of important events" mean anything to anyone here with a knowledge of the Christian religion or the transition from the pagan world to the Christian one?
I do not think the sound similarities to a Jewish concept such as a bar mitzvah (where bar implies son) is necessarily the way to go with this, since all three components are actual words in an existing language ...


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